11 Best WordPress Email Marketing Plugins
Do you want to run your email marketing campaigns altogether with WordPress? WordPress is as flexible as it can get in email marketing, thanks to some of the best WordPress email marketing plugins.
In this article, I have listed the best WordPress email marketing plugins in 2024 that you can use.
In this article, I have divided the plugins into various categories based on your email marketing needs.
Also read: Best Email Marketing Software and Tools for Businesses & Marketers
Table of Contents
The Best WordPress Email Marketing Plugins
See, there are several steps involved in creating a full-fledged email marketing campaign and you must know what to do once you are done with one step and then the other.
Basically, there are 4 steps involved in email marketing.
- Lead Capture: In this stage, you use lead magnets like email subscription forms to entice the readers to follow your newsletter or email marketing list. I have listed the best lead capture and lead generation plugins in the first section of this article.
- Subscriber Management: This is the first thing that you should decide actually. There are two ways you can manage subscribers, emails and leads using WordPress.
- First, use a SaaS email marketing service like Constant Contact, Aweber, Sendfox, Sendinblue or Mailchimp. You can then use a good lead generation plugin to send the leads to the email marketing service of your choice.
- The second option is to host all the data on your WordPress database. This is a privacy-first approach and cheaper than the first option. All you will need is a good newsletter or CRM plugin that can store your leads and send emails as per your needs. You may need an email delivery system for this to function well.
- Email Delivery: WordPress's default email delivery system
mail()
is very limited and is often subject to fail. You can use an SMTP plugin and an SMTP delivery service (like Gmail, Sendinblue etc.) to send newsletters with more confidence. - Landing Pages: Landing pages are the pages on which you'd want your email subscriber to land. You can use these to showcase some news, cross-sell products and even let them resubscribe again
By following these 4 steps, you can create a full-fledged email marketing system with WordPress. When choosing any service or product, free or paid, be sure to understand if that's going to work for you.
Even if you have aptly decided to buy a product or service, you must check whether or not they have a refund policy in case things didn't work for you. Great customer support is a must as well.
Best Email Lead Generation Plugins for WordPress
Since the first step is to generate leads, I will discuss the best lead capture tools in this section. Here are my pick for the best email lead generation plugins for WordPress.
- Convert Pro
- Landing Page Builder plugin by PluginOps
- Bloom
- OptinMonster
- Optin Forms
- WP Subscribe
- Ninja Popups
- Thrive Leads
Convert Pro
Convert Pro is one of the best lead generation and email marketing tools for WordPress. It offers various targeting rules for your email capture forms. Under these rules, you will be able to target your opt-ins by various conditions, such as the content on your website, signed-in WordPress users, referrers, new vs. returning visitors, devices, etc. It also allows you to create and showcase various kinds of offers like inline forms, welcome mats, notification bars, lightbox popups, and much more.
You can conveniently design forms with the help of its excellent templates and visual drag-and-drop builder. After publishing a popup, you can use Convert Pro's inbuilt Google Analytics integration to analyze its effectiveness.
You can get Convert Pro for $79, which allows you to use it on unlimited websites.
Landing Page Builder plugin by PluginOps
The Landing Page Builder plugin by PluginOps has been mainly designed for building landing pages. However, you can use it for list building as well. It comes with a handy drag-and-drop interface and is entirely based on HTML/CSS. With its help, you can drag every element of your page, move around widgets, and reorder rows using its drag-and-drop features.
This plugin's free form builder widget lets you gather and store email addresses, form submissions, and other data. You can also add any form using shortcodes and save leads with the help of inbuilt subscribe forms in the page builder database.
Bloom
This is a relatively simple building plugin from Elegant Themes, the creators of the well-known Divi plugin/theme. Bloom offers six different kinds of forms, including content lockers, inline forms, pop-ups, and slide-ins. After beginning with over a hundred ready-made templates, you can proceed to customize your selected template's colors and content to match your website with the help of a simple editor.
Unfortunately, Bloom does not have a drag-and-drop builder, which means less visual approach to optin building. You can, however, edit the colors and content of the templates. There are many rules for triggering your popups, including certain special options that allow you to trigger a popup when a user buys something or posts a comment. You will also get all the basic targeting rules, such as page-level targeting.
Bloom also features A/B testing, inbuilt analytics, and integration of over 19 email marketing services, including all the prominent options. It is a great choice as long as you are not bothered by the lack of advanced targeting rules (such as referrer targeting) and a flexible drag-and-drop builder.
If you are satisfied with Elegant Themes' other plugins or themes like Divi, you could also consider going for this one.
Bloom is available with Elegant Themes' $89 membership. This membership gives you access to all other themes and plugins from them, including the Divi theme, Monarch, and Bloom Plugins.
OptinMonster
This list-building tool has been mainly designed to help you produce various kinds of popup offers, including notification bars, welcome mats, lightbox popups, and so on.
Although OptinMonster began as a list-building plugin, it is now more of a standalone SaaS tool. However, a dedicated WordPress integration plugin is still available, and you can use it to display your opt-in forms on your website conveniently.
You can easily create your opt-in forms using OptinMonster's excellent ready-made templates and a handy visual drag-and-drop builder, which allows you to customize each part of your form completely. OptinMonster is also well-known for its versatile options when it comes to triggering and targeting rules. These give you incredible control and help you customize your opt-ins, thus helping you improve your conversion rates. Listed below are some of the prominent rules you will receive:
- Location (geotargeting)
- New vs. returning visitors
- Referring websites
- If a user has visited a particular page or not
- Device
- Your website's content
If you need to run a WooCommerce store, OptinMonster offers helpful targeting rules specific to e-commerce as well. It will also give you access to flexible trigger rules like the well-known exit intent trigger. OptinMonster is readily compatible with all major email marketing services, such as Aweber, Mailchimp, and GetResponse.
After you publish your offer, this plugin features its inbuilt analytics integration with Google Analytics, giving you access to all your conversational content inside your Google Analytics report. You can optimize your offers with the help of A/B tests as well.
OptinMonster is free to begin with, but the pro pricing begins at $108 per year. To get access to features like exit intent triggers and A/B testing, you will have to go for higher-tier plans.
Optin Forms
Optin Forms is a free-to-use plugin that is refreshingly devoid of the annoying popups present in many other email list-building tools. Rather, it allows you to conveniently build high-quality inline forms which you can easily display above or below your content.
You can also use a shortcode to manually put an opt-in form in the middle of your content or elsewhere on your website. This plugin is readily compatible with all major autoresponder services like GetResponse, AWeber, Mailchimp, and so on.
Optin Forms has five native templates of decent quality, which are readily customizable. However, it does not come with a drag-and-drop builder. You can personalize your forms with greater ease by its handy live preview option. It is an excellent choice for users who require a free and simple plugin to put opt-in forms in their content.
WP Subscribe
This is a relatively simple WordPress list-building plugin that works closely along the lines of Bloom. Namely, you will have access to ready-made templates that can be readily customized with your own content and colors. Unfortunately, due to the lack of a drag-and-drop builder, you will not be able to fully personalize each and every element. That said, WP Subscribe Pro is still a great option if you simply need to put together some visually appealing opt-in forms in a short span of time.
WP Subscribe readily integrates with all major email marketing services. It also possesses triggers like exit-intent and page-level targeting, allowing you to control where your popup forms are displayed. Although its features are rather limited compared to other list-building plugins, it is simple to use and economically priced. If you seek a plugin that fulfills these criteria, you should consider going for it.
You can try out a limited free version of WP Subscribe at WordPress.org. Its paid version is $19 and can be used on a single site.
Ninja Popups
If you want to put up visually appealing popups on your website, Ninja Popups is another great option for you to choose. It has proved to be particularly popular at Envato's CodeCanyon market, where it has maintained an excellent 4.32-star rating on more than 1,700 reviews and been purchased by users more than 37,000 times. This article mainly deals with its list-building features, so Ninja Popups shouldn't be here by the rules. But you can also use the popups for increasing your social follows, getting more social shares, and so on.
Ninja Popups comes with a large number of ready-made templates, which you can personalize with the help of a reasonably good drag-and-drop builder. It also has many other helpful features like inbuilt statistics, A/B testing, page-level targeting rules, numerous placement options, and many trigger options like exit intent. It is also compatible with all prominent email marketing service providers like Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, GetResponse, iContact, and Aweber.
If you wish to add additional features, you can purchase optional add-ons, giving you access to more ready-made templates and placement options like a widget or notification bar. Ninja Popups costs $27 for lifetime usage on a single site with six months of support.
Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads has been developed by Thrive Themes, the creators of several other prominent WordPress tools that deal with conversion. It is a robust lead generation tool that you can use to produce several different opt-in forms, such as notification bars, slide-ins, welcome mats, and lightbox popups. You can choose to give the popups a go and produce regular inline forms, which can be displayed wherever you like on your website. It is readily compatible with most major email marketing and webinar services.
You can either make use of Thrive Leads' numerous ready-made templates or put together your own designs afresh. It also features a high-quality visual drag-and-drop builder, which is a simpler version of the Thrive Architect page builder plugin by Thrive Themes. It gives you precise control over your designs. You will also have access to an impressive list of targeting rules, which includes page-level targeting. Some advanced targeting rules like referrer targeting, however, are missing here.
You will get inbuilt analytics to monitor a form after you have published it. You can also optimize it with the help of new A/B tests. Thrive Leads is especially remarkable for allowing you to do more than simply testing content changes. It lets you test various targeting rules and even build drastically different kinds of forms. It also has SmartLinks – a special feature that allows you to conceal the opt-in form from your existing subscribers and display another offer instead.
As part of the Thrive Suite membership, Thrive Leads is priced at $90 per quarter. By subscribing, you will also get access to all other Thrive tools, such as Thrive Optimize, Thrive Ovation, Thrive Comments, Thrive Architect, and so on.
Which one to choose?
- If you're a WordPress website owner who wants value for money, you should go for Thrive Leads or Convert Pro.
- If you're looking for a truly outstanding set of targeting rules, you should consider OptinMonster.
- For creating basic popups and inline list building forms, you can readily go with any of the plugins mentioned in this list but for more intensive popups, use Ninja Popups.
Self-Hosted Email Marketing Plugins For WordPress
Some WordPress email marketing plugins allow you to self-hosting your whole email marketing system. In this, all you need are an email marketing plugin and an email sending service like Amazon SES or Sendinblue — and you are all done.
If you’re thinking about setting up your own email mailing list or subscription service, here are 3 really good and reliable self-hosted email marketing services for bloggers and small businesses.
FluentCRM
FluentCRM is the ultimate CRM and email marketing services plugin for WordPress. With features that go far beyond what competing plugins offer, it will help you manage your leads and customers, email campaigns, automated email sequencing, learner and affiliate management, and much more in one place; without having to leave your WordPress dashboard.
Dozens of built-in integrations with WordPress major plugins give you the power to create a fully automated marketing campaign and build a thriving online business that doesn’t need expensive third-party solutions.
The FluentCRM plugin offers powerful features for creating and managing email marketing campaigns. It gives you the tools to engage with your prospects and make more informed business decisions, from planning your campaign to tracking the performance of your email marketing deliverability.
Mailpoet
MailPoet is professional newsletter management and email marketing service plugin for WordPress, which allows you to send beautiful emails to your subscribers.
It seamlessly integrates with WordPress, so you can send emails right from your dashboard.
MailPoet lets you collect data points such as open rates, click-throughs, time spent on your newsletters and much more. Improve your email marketing with MailPoet.
Mailster
Mailster is a simple-to-use email marketing plugin for WordPress available at a single-time price. Mailster lets you create, send and track email newsletters all within your WordPress site. Whether you’re managing a business or simply creating a blog, Mailster will make collecting emails and sending out newsletters simple.